Mitchell, S.A. (1999).

Attachment Theory and the Psychoanalytic Tradition:

Reflections on Human Relationality, Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 9:85-107.

Connie

Connie had had a quite successful experience in psychotherapy with someone else
that ended about ten years before she came to see me. She had suffered an early,
catastrophic loss of her major attachment figure when she was five years old, and
in many ways both her earlier therapy and her work with me were largely
concerned with the implications of that loss. However, in our work, various other
psychodynamic facets emerged that I found useful to conceptualize in terms of the
contributions of Fairbairn, Winnicott, Loewald, and interpersonal psychoanalysis.
Therefore, this work lends itself to an exercise in juxtaposing and playing with
Bowlby's concepts together with those of other psychoanalytic authors. I don't
want to suggest that all of these theories are congruent and integratable at all
points. I believe that Winnicott, for example, locates the core of the individual in
a solitary privacy, which is quite different from the more interactive self of
Loewald and Sullivan. But I believe that these authors all have illuminated crucial
features of human relationality thattaken together, selectivelyhave generated a
powerful and compelling alternative to classical Freudian theory.

Connie came for treatment in her mid-40s for two reasons. First, the chronic
sadness that had haunted her her whole life, that had been somewhat alleviated by
psychotherapy in her 30s, had returned. Her mother had died suddenly in a car
accident when she was five years old. In her first therapy, it had become clear that
her persistent sense of sadness and episodic tearfulness were connected with a
mourning for her mother that had never been able to take place. Her father had
felt that the loss of his wife was just too painful for Connie and her older brother
to speak about, so she was never mentioned throughout Connie's childhood. In her
therapy, Connie began to speak about and feel her loss directly for the first time.
She remembered finding a picture of her mother hidden away in a closet when
she was a child. She recalled going into the closet and searching that picture
longingly, trying to stir up memories of the mother who had quickly faded from
her experience. That therapy was very important to her: it provided an
opportunity for a mourning process that had never been allowed to take place, and
it placed her sadness in a context of meaning. But considerable sadness remained,
and it increased in severity when she married in her late 30s and had a son, who
himself was now five years old. This boynot surprising to us but very disturbing
to herhad extremely intense separation problems. Connie knew this must have
something to do with the loss of her mother at the same age he was now, and she

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was concerned about imposing on him the tragedy of her own early life.

The second reason Connie sought another analytic treatment was that she had
always felt there was something different about her, something other people had
that she lacked. They seemed to have a self, it appearedsome much more grounded
sense of who they are. Even though she was objectively an extremely
accomplished and creative person, she felt she lacked that inner sense. She knew
that lack had something to do with the loss of her mother and the hole she felt in
her experience ever since. She imagined that one of the things mothers do for
their children is help them recognize who they are, what they are like, and she
tried especially hard to do that with her own son. But would it ever be possible to
find that missing experience for herself?

One of the first things that became apparent in our work was that Connie's early
loss went way beyond the loss of her mother. Her father felt completely
overwhelmed by the death of his wife and by his responsibility for his two young
children. He decided the only possible plan was to send them both to boarding
school. The older brother went off to a military school, and Connie went off to an
orphanage/boarding school several hundred miles away from home. The nuns at
the orphanage took good care of her, but it was an almost completely anonymous
life. She lived in a dormitory with other girls; her bed was like all the other beds,
with all signs of distinct and distinguishing characteristics disallowed. One of her
most vivid visceral memories of the nuns was the starched bibs they wore,
betraying nothing of warm breasts or body underneath. She would return home to
be with her father on weekends. She felt extremely grateful that he would come to
pick her up each weekend, as there were other girls who were orphaned and had
nobody. She wrote to her father everyday, telling him she loved him, so as to
remind him not to forget her. It was only after seven years that the father felt the
children were old enough to return home on a regular basis. On the weekends and
in living with her father after returning home, Connie experienced him as
extremely overtaxed and brittle. It seemed desperately important never to burden
him with her own needs, as if the fragile elements of her provided home could
themselves instantly cave in. So, Connie lost more than her mother at age five; in
effect, she lost her whole world. It is, impossible, of course, to capture the
complex texture of an analytic process in writing. Nevertheless, I pull out four
themes from my work with Connie to illustrate the ways in which the angles on
relationality developed in the writings of Fairbairn, Winicott, Loewald, and
Sullivan, together with Bowlby, have provided for me a rich convergence for
thinking about the psychoanalytic process.

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Attachments to Unavailable or Unsatisfying Objects

In speaking about the hole left by her mother's death, Connie came to elaborate
the ways in which she felt different from other people. As we returned to this
theme repeatedly, in its many different variations, the extent to which the loss of
her mother and its impact on her life had become the way in which Connie had
come to define herself, to distinguish herself from others, became increasingly
apparent. Her sadness, even though anguishing, had, she feared, become her
destiny. She couldn't remember her mother; all she had was a hole in the fabric of
her experiencea hole left behind by her mother's disappearance.

Main (1995) notes the shift in thinking about attachment from the early notion
that disturbances in mothering generate poorly or weakly attached children to the
understanding (more compatible with Fairbairn's notion of attachment to bad
objects) that children become inevitably powerfully attached to whatever is
available. Quantitative terms (such as strongly or weakly attached) are not used in
describing differences among individuals. Infants who have become attached to
maltreating or simply insensitive attachment figures are presumed no less' attached
than others, and virtually all infants become attached (pp. 411-412). In this sense,
rather than distinguishing between secure and insecure attachments, we might
distinguish between attachments to secure and insecure or absent objects. For
Connie, her mother's absence created a powerful presence; her attachment to that
absence served as a central, defining feature of her sense of self. Her continual
unconscious mourning for her mother served as a perpetual object tie linking
Connie to her mother. This theme resurfaced throughout her life in ways that I
found surprising and fascinating. One session, she began talking about a new book
she had been reading about groups of climbers on Mt. Everest. She'd been finding
the book completely captivating. As we explored its power for her, she began to
speak of extreme situations, like climbing Everest, as something she fantasized
about a lot and also had sought out in some wilderness travel. Her visit to the
tundra in Alaska had been a high point in her life. There was something about the
self-state generated amid the bleakness of the tundra landscape, the gripping
feeling of the enormity of the world and her own smallness, that paradoxically
generated a sense of serenity and security she had found so hard to come by. Such
a world seemed unforgiving, she said, and it was that very quality she found
reassuring. Similarly, in the long distance running and swimming she spent a lot
of time doing, she felt closest to contacting that sense of self she found so elusive
in other circumstances. As she drove herself past pain, she felt she had some
defining sense of who she was, what sort of a person she could be. One could
think of these experiences in terms of guilt and masochism. Did Connie feel

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somehow responsible for her mother's death? Was the unforgiving quality of
bleakness and pain a self-punishment for what she felt had been her crime? But,
along Fairbairn lines, it also seemed as if the bleakness and enormity of the
wilderness and her ability to survive and transcend pain evoked something of the
aching emptiness of her losses and of the unforgiving world of the school in
which she found herself and had survived. In the absence of a secure attachment
figure, the bleakness and pain itself had become a point of reference for self-
recognition.

In her current life, Connie spends a lot of time thinking about what constitutes a
home and how to provide a home for her son. At one point in discussing these
issuesa point I found particularly poignantshe said that she had always had very
powerful feelings associated with the sound of a screen door closing. In fact, she
had loved that sound so much, she had once tried to have custom-made a
miniature screen door that she could keep on her desk. Her associations led to
feeling as if she were a kid going out the back door of her house into the backyard
and the rest of the worldfeeling the solidity of the house behind her that the sound
of the door conveyed to her. It was as if that sound were an anchor, a point of
attachment.

The Self, Desire, and Mourning

Connie regarded the sadness that had constantly accompanied her since early
childhood as connected with the loss of her mother and the subsequent loss of
mothering throughout her childhood. The first therapy had made that sadness
more vivid and meaningful but had not helped her free herself of it. There were
times during that work that she felt almost paralyzed by her feelings. She had a
deep fear of coming back for more analytic work, because she experienced her
mournful sadness as a bottomless pit. She hoped our work would help free her of
it but feared that even more painful losses would be stirred up.

After a while, I began to feel that there was something in the way Connie
organized her current experiences that contributed to regenerating her sadness, that
her feelings reflected something she was giving up in the present as much as
something she had lost in the past. Somehow, probably because it is one of my
favorite subjects, we had gotten into speaking about her approach to food and
eating. She tended to be extremely health conscious, with a focus on eating salads
and vegetables. However, she allowed herself one bag of M&Ms each afternoon. I
have always disliked M&Ms, so I became intrigued with the specificity of that
choice. She liked M&Ms partly because each bit of chocolate was covered with a

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hard shell; it was modular, she said. Now, I like my chocolate accompanied by a
sense of limitless self-indulgence. I wondered whether she ever ate Milky-Way
bars, suspecting probably not. Of course she had tried them, but the thing about
Milky-Ways was precisely that their richness and size could easily make you feel
sick and regretful after a while. Connie recalled that the kind of supervisory care
that she provided for her son's eating had been lost for her with the death of her
mother. There was nobody who would watch out for the short-and long-term
health implications of what she ate. She learned early on to do that for herself.
She would start with what seemed conscientious and sensible and then let herself
desire what was feasible. I compared that silently with my own experience, which
moves in the other direction, from an initial impulse of limitless desire to
regretful considerations connected with having a mortal body in the real world. I
mused with Connie about the implications of her never having had the experience,
at least within memory, of not having to worry about real considerations of health
and safety, of being able to give oneself over to impulses of sheer desire and
pleasure, taking for granted that someone else would be watchful. We began to
feel that part of her sadness was a present accompaniment of the sensible and
conscientious approach to living that had enabled her to survive.

I began to realize that we were dealing with issues of the sort that Winnicott had
described in his exploration of the ways in which personal meaning and a sense of
self are generated. True-self experience, in Winnicott's terms, begins with a
spontaneous gesture that emerges from a core of subjective omnipotence;
spontaneous gestures are, in the beginning, actualized by the good-enough mother
and thereby consolidated into a sense of oneself as good and real. Because Connie
had lost that parental provision precipitously, she had to take over that caretaking
role for herself. The consequence was not so much a sense of falseness in
Winnicott's terms but a chronic sense of sadness and of something missing.

We began to realize that Connie's approach to chocolate was prototypical of her

way of organizing much of her experience, including personal relationships. She
would figure out what was possible to have and then let herself want things
within those borders. The area of her life in which considerable sadness was
generated through this approach was with her husband, who was quite self-
absorbed. Although he actually seemed to have a rich range of emotional
potentials if not pushed, he could easily convey the impression that he was not
available for much intimacy. And, especially in her experience with her father,
Connie had learned that a seamless adaptation to what was available, not pushing,
was the way to survive.

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 Bowlby and Ainsworth pointed to the provision in secure attachment of a safe
base for an exploration of the world. This aspect of the work with Connie suggests
that another experience that secure attachment provides is the safety to explore not
just the external world but the internal world of personal preferences, desires, and
impulseswhat Winnicott called spontaneous gestures. When the safety that a
dependable attachment figure provides is missing, the child herself tends to
precociously fill in the missing parental function (Winnicott's caretaker self), and
opportunities for a worry-free surrender to one's own experience is foreclosed.
(See also Ghent, 1992, on surrender.)

The Other as Part of Oneself

During a stretch of several weeks when her son's separation problems had been
quite acute, Connie began to describe, somewhat shamefully, her sense that her
son was part of [her]. This, of course, is not what enlightened parents are
supposed to think, but we explored some ways in which this was in fact, her
reality. She described her experience of watching her son play with his classmates.
She couldn't take her eyes off him. It was as if he were endlessly fascinating. I
knew something about what she was describing from experiences with my own
children, but her feelings seemed to be more intense and pervasive. So, I asked
her to see if she could get at the feelings connected with her sense that he was part
of her.

Connie remembered her absorption in her pregnancy, when, in a quite literal

sense, her son was part of her. She remembered the strangeness of the separation
that constituted his birth; she still felt him as part of her, although no longer
literally so. She then associated to her memories that in losing her mother she had
lost a part of herself. In fact, she'd felt an absence, a kind of hole, in herself ever
since that time, as if a part of her had disappeared and never returned. She'd felt
that perhaps, in becoming a mother, she could find her own mother, although it
had never really felt quite like that. I suggested that when she had lost her mother
she had also lost a version of herself and that her fascination with her son was
partly a fasination with a childhood of which she herself had been robbed. In
watching him, she was also watching for lost parts of herself and for her lost
mother, who had never seen them. How would we want to characterize Connie's
experience of her son as part of her? Is this an illusion? Is it a primitive fantasy?
Is it a break in reality testing? It is here that I find some of Loewald's ideas
helpful. Loewald believed that we organize our experience on different levels
simultaneously. Borrowing Freud's terms but imbuing them with very different
meanings, Loewald depicts a primary process (organized around a primal density

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of experience in which dichotomies like selfother, pastpresent, and innerouter do
not exist) and a secondary process (in which the customary categories of
conventional, adaptive living apply). Loewald's concerns are close to Winnicott's
in the latter's descriptions of transitional phenomena, but, in his final work,
Loewald (1988) stressed a very important difference from Winnicott. Winnicott
regards the early subjective experiences of the child, including transitional
experience, as suffused with omnipotence and illusion, whereas Loewald regards
many primary-process experiences, particularly those of undifferentiation between
self and others, as not illusions at all. For Loewald, primary process and
secondary process constitute alternative and equally valid, equally real, forms of
organizing experience. The task of psychoanalysis is not a transformation of
primary process into secondary process, not a removal of fantasy and distortion,
but an opening up of the severed, potentially enriching links between fantasy and
actuality.

Thus, Connie's experience of her son as part of her might be understood as a

reality of a different sort than the conventional one we generally inhabit. Connie's
early catastrophic loss seems to have been experienced not only as the loss of an
other, but as the loss of an other self, a world, all jumbled up. Her pregnancy
temporarily filled the hole left by that loss, and her son came to signify for her
parts of herself that were there and parts of herself that she experienced only as
absences. He, in turn, must have come to experience her losses and terror of
separation as his own. According to Loewald, it is a mistake to understand these
experiences as fantasied distortions of reality due to pathological, aborted
mourning. Rather, they are pieces of reality. On a primary-process level, we are
not separate from our significant others; in intense emotional experiences, we
cocreate events and share resonating emotions that are not neatly assignable to
discrete categories like selfother and innerouter. In this view, what Connie needs
to accomplish is not a neat separation from her mother and her son but a greater
capacity to contain varied experiences of both union with and differentiation from
them.

Enrichment of the Analytic Relationship

Among the most radical implications of Sullivan's concept of the interpersonal

field was the notion that mind is not something each of us carries around inside
the skull, not something in control over how much to reveal or conceal of itself to
others; mind is transpersonal and contextual. Mind emerges in interactions with
other minds. No matter how much of an observer the analyst tries to be, Sullivan
was suggesting, he is also inevitably a participant. Sullivan's early concepts were

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developed by subsequent interpersonal theorists into an approach to the analytic
process that emphasizes the here-and-now relationship between the two
participants. Whereas theorists within the British independent group (e.g., like
Fairbairn, Winnicott, Balint) wrote about the analytic relationship in terms of
missing parental provisions and functions, the interpersonalists wrote about the
analytic relationship in less developmental, more intersubjective terms.
Particularly in the contributions of Edgar Levenson, the analyst is portrayed as
inevitably embedded within the transferencecountertransference mix. With this
background in mind, I trace several important points in the evolution of the
analytic relationship that Connie and I coconstructedpoints that I believe provided
her with different sorts of attachment experiences than her early life had allowed.

Despite my suggestion that greater frequency of sessions would be preferable,

Connie began our work on a once-a-week basis, which was more than enough for
her, thank you. She was extremely wary of the feelings that might be unleashed,
and she was concerned about the dangers of being in therapy for the rest of her
life. Connie used the time very conscientiously and productively from the start.
She was a keen and thoughtful observer of her own experience. I liked her very
much and enjoyed talking with her. I soon found the once a week frequency
depriving. I found myself wanting more of her and, upon reflection, realized that
I was feeling something like her childhood feelings of longing in relation to her
father's weekly visits. But it wasn't only the frequency that seemed rigidly
controlled. Any questions about feelings she might be having in relation to me
were met with incredulity. Why would she have feelings about me? This was a
strictly professional relationship, after all. There was clearly something in this of
her experiences with the nuns. Any personal feelings between us would be
inappropriate and would likely end up in painful longing. She said this in a
manner that made me feel as if my even entertaining the idea that we might
actually have feelings about each other was a sign of immaturity and perverse
silliness on my part. So, I stayed at my assigned distance and waited.

A couple of months into the work, Connie surprised me by beginning a session in

considerable distress. How did this therapy work, she wanted to know. She felt
there was something terribly impersonal about the way I greeted her, without even
saying her name, in the waiting room right after the previous, probably equally
anonymous patient had left. I at first felt a little stung by this accusation,
particularly because I had been struggling myself with what felt to me to be a
distance imposed by her. I began to wonder if I had not unconsciously retaliated
by toning down my emotional reactions to her at the beginning and end of our
sessions. I do tend sometimes to be pretty businesslike. And my customary way of

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greeting patients was to acknowledge their presence with a hello and invite them
into my office without mentioning their names. We explored Connie's experience
of these interactions, but she was still angry. I explained that it was just not my
customary style to mention people's names when greeting them, either inside or
outside the therapy setting. She felt that what she experienced as the anonymity of
my manner was intolerable and that, unless I would sometimes mention her name,
she would be unable to continue. We agreed that it would not make sense for me
to do this mechanically but that I would try to find a way that was genuine for
me. And I did. I actually found that I enjoyed saying her name, and her responses
to my greetings were warmer than they had been before. I realized that there was
something a bit pressured about my let's get down to work attitude. I even began
to change my manner of greeting and parting from other patients. It seemed to me
that Connie and I were working something out related to distance and intimacy,
presence and loss, that was not unrelated to her early traumas and deprivations but
that was happening in a very live way between us now. A couple of months
following our newly fashioned manner of greeting and parting, Connie said that
she felt that she had too much to talk about in once-a-week sessions, and she
began to come twice weekly. The work continued to go well, focusing on
recurrent patterns in different areas of her life. She reported feeling better,
somehow, less chronically sad and more grounded in a sense of who she is. We
would periodically speak about her sense of oddness about our sessions, how
unrelated they seemed to the rest of her life. She often had trouble remembering
what we had spoken of shortly after leaving and almost seemed surprised to find
herself there again at the beginning of sessions. We looked at her struggles with
keeping the connection with me alive from many different angles.

About a year into the work, Connie reported for several weeks a strong feeling of
not wanting to come for sessions. We were both puzzled by these feelings but felt
that we would come to learn more about them as we went along. She then
reported a dream in which she got into a taxi, and her destination was a desolate,
windy street. The driver was an Indian or Pakistani who was wearing a turban and
who, she slowly realized, was angry, threatening, and probably dangerous. She
was considering how she would get out of the taxibut then the dream ended.

Her associations to the street were to a childhood friend who had become
schizophrenic and lived in a halfway house by the water on the edge of the city in
which they had grown up. It was indeed a windy place. Then there was my street,
which is also windy. We played with the sense of me as unknown, exotic, strange,
threatening, perhaps dangerous. She felt that the dream reflected a sense that the
work with me had become, somewhat suprisingly, important to her and that she

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wasn't sure where that would leave her. We spoke of her need to keep me
separated from the rest of her lifeout at the end of the Earth. There was something
about that splitting that kept me safe for her to touch base with and leave and also
that kept the rest of her life safe for her to handle on her own. But her locating me
out on the periphery of her world also made me foreign, distant, unknown.
About a week later, she reported a powerful experience with her husband or, more
accurate, in her feelings toward her husband. Their relationship was quite caring
and mutually supportive in times of crisis but, in many respects, quite distant and
cool in an ongoing way. We had been working, on and off, on the part she played
in maintaining that distance. She had come to realize that she had long ago
decided that her husband was simply unavailable to meet her emotional needs, and
so she had stopped even being aware of having any emotional needs vis--vis him.
Recently, she had become aware of wanting things from him and had tried, with
varying degrees of success, to express those desires with him.

The experience she reported was of going to bed after he had already gone to
sleep. She had the compelling thought that she might wake him to make love; it
felt that such a gesture would constitute a forgiveness of her chronic grievances
against him. She decided not to wake him and, as was her custom, simply went
quietly to sleep beside him. We explored, among other things, her sense that to be
close to him in one way would entail renouncing her right to her own needs in
other ways.

In the next session, Connie reported a fight they had had. It was typical of their
fights but had a somewhat different ending. He had left a used teabag in the sink.
His untidiness had been a chronic issue between them. He had grown up in a
wealthy family with maids to clean up after him. They lived a comfortable but by
no means luxurious life now and no maids. Connie felt he continually left messes
for her to clean up. They had made some progressin their early years, the teabag
would have been left on the tablebut she felt a deep sense of bitterness at what she
felt was his taking her for granted. She expressed this to him, and he felt attacked,
leading to counterattacks. He was effective at debate, and, traditionally, she would
give in, apologizing for what seemed to be the inappropriate intensity of her
anger. That surrender would leave her feeling demoralized and despairing. This
time she defended her position without giving in, which was a considerable
accomplishment. But she felt an aching sense that she would never feel taken into
account as a person in the way she longed for. In making the kind of detailed
inquiry about which Sullivan wrote extensively, I got interested in the way Connie
presented her concerns to her husband. His methodology of finding out exactly
who said what to whom can sometimes be very enlightening. By the time Connie

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opened up these discussions with her husband, she was already very angry, and his
sense that he was being attacked seemed understandable to me. But what was
really demoralizing to her was the sense that he operated as if she did not exist for
him, as if she had no presence in his mind. And, in the end, it was her chronic,
pervasive sense of isolation that contributed to her perpetual sadness.

I do what I often do in this kind of situation, which is to try to imagine another

way to deal with the situation that might run a greater chance of a more
constructive outcome. I told her that it seemed to me that the issue was really not
the power negotiation over who did what jobsalways an important issue within
couplesbut that she ended up feeling invisible to him, trapped in her familiar but
sad solitude. I asked her what she thought might happen if she opened the
discussion with him by explaining that she valued a feeling of connection with
him, that his acting as if he were unaware of the impact of his behavior on her
made her feel as if she had no place in his mind. The issue was not to control or
criticize him but to find a way for the two of them to feel mindful of and related
to each other. Although I hadn't thought about it at the time, I was clearly
exploring the aspect of mentalization that Fonagy finds central in the healthy
experience of secure attachment. Connie found herself amazed at the thought that
she might broach these issues with him in this way. She realized that the reason
she would never have thought about approaching him in that way was it would
imply that she actually had some ongoing emotional need for connection with
him, and that certainly wasn't something of which she was ordinarily aware.
Suggesting alternative ways of handling interpersonal situations is not generally
considered within the bounds of traditional analytic technique, but I sometimes
find it very useful. The suggestions are almost never simply picked up on and
used. That is not the point. What is invariably most interesting and useful is the
patient's thoughts and feelings in reaction to my imaginary alternatives. They are
really a kind of thought experiment.

Connie returned for the next session brimming with intense mixed feelings. She'd
been thinking a great deal about the previous session. It was true that the sense of
emotional connection to her husband, a sense that she had a presence in his mind,
was very important to her, she now realized. To actively express that need seemed
both exhilarating and frightening. She feared that anyone who became aware of
her needs for him or her would likely feel burdened and abandon her. She had
trouble imagining that she could actually give expression to such needs and still
remain herselfsuch an act seemed so far from the self she recognized herself to be.
Yet, she felt excited at the prospect of exploring new possibilities. However, she
also resented the fact that such cathartic feelings and exhilarating thoughts had

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emerged in her therapy rather than in conversation with her husband. I kidded her
about her fear of catharsis outside marriage. We laughed together about that.
Sessions over the next several months primarily explored various facets of her
relationship with her husband, in which she was becoming more adept at locating
and expressing her own needs, both for contact with him and for freedom from
his need of her. In one discussion, which was extraordinarily important to her, he
had come out of his absorption in his own work to speak to her. Rather than
make herself grudgingly available, as was her wont, Connie told him thatat that
moment, 10:00 Tuesday eveningwatching her favorite TV show was actually more
important to her than being available to speak with him. Although seemingly
trivial, this was an extremely precarious act of extraordinary personal freedom for
her in their relationship. It seemed as if her increased ability to be aware of and
express her attachment to him also allowed her to begin to be able to establish her
independence from him without the paralyzing dread of losing him.

In conclusion, I have tried to show the ways in which major relational authors
have contributed to our clinical understanding of different facets and implications
of human relationality and attachment. Fairbairn explored the psychodynamics of
attachments to physically or emotionally absent parenting figures. Winnicott
illuminated the subtle ways in which secure attachment facilitates the development
of a personal sense of self and the ways in which the absence of such parental
functions adaptively forecloses such development. Loewald's innovative theorizing
suggests that the apparent separation between the subject who attaches and the
object of attachment overlays a primary-process level of organization in which
self and other exist in various degrees of undifferentiation from each other.
Loewald suggests that healthy object relations consists not so much in a clear
separation of self from others but in a capacity to contain in dialectical tensions
different mutually enriching forms of relatedness. And, finally, Sullivan and
contemporary interpersonalists have contributed to our understanding of the ways
in which the vicissitudes of early attachment experiences play themselves out in
current relationships, including the transferencecountertransference relationship
with the analyst. At this point in the evolution of psychological ideas, attachment
theory and psychoanalytic theory, rather than offering alternative pathways, offer
an exciting possibility for a convergence that is mutually enriching.

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Bowlby, J. (1980), Loss: Sadness and Degression. New York: Basic Books. []

Cavell, M. (1993), The Psychoanalytic Mind: From Freud to Philosophy.

Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Fairbairn, W. R. D. (1952), Psychoanalytic Studies of the Personality. London:

Tavistock. []

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